The trivium, grammer , logic and rhetoric

Intellectual Self Defence & Developing Critical Thinking Skills

by with No Comment Behind the NewsHealthProductivity

Developing Critical Thinking Skills

This is not something our educational system or cuture seems to value. However nowadays we have access to more information than ever before, but at the same time we are more confused. This make developing critical thinking skills a higher priority for everyone. I covered problems and the causes of this problem in a previous blog post called “Education or Instruction?”. Poor critical thinking skills are so endemic that many people have lost confidence in their own ability to make decisions. Most people outsource the majority of their most important thinking to other people believing themselves incapable. I believe there’s huge room for improvement in most people , including myself and for this reason I was very excited when I came accross the Trivium and the Peace Revolution Podcast. Lacking in the ability and confidence to scrutinize information makes a person an easy target for scoundrels.  The Peace Revolution Podcast aims to provide information and tools to develop skills needed for  “intellectual self defence” by developing critical thinking skills.

 

The Trivium is one of those tools . Today the trivium is taught only in a small group of elite educational establishments.  The fundamentals  of the trivium are ancient, they were developed by  Aristotle. The Latin word “Trivium” means “from the three ways”

1. General Grammar (Answers the question of the Who, What, Where, and the When of a subject.) Discovering and ordering facts of reality comprises basic, systematic Knowledge

2. Formal Logic (Answers the Why of a subject.) Developing the faculty of reason in establishing valid [i.e., non-contradictory] relationships among facts, systematic Understanding

3. Classical Rhetoric (Provides the How of a subject.) Applying knowledge and understanding expressively comprises Wisdom or, in other words, it is systematically useable knowledge and understanding

Reference http://www.triviumeducation.com/

The mastery of the Trivium allows for an individual to quickly assimilate information, judge its quality and turn this information into wisdom. Wisdom being knowledge that has useful application. In studying the trivium Formal Logic is a good place to start as it deals with the identification of lies, which is something we are bombarded daily. Using Formal Logic to Identify fallacies   The study of Formal Logic helps understanding by rooting out contradictions and fallacies. Fallacies are not the same as lies they are information that is either deliberately or unknowingly misleading.  With the trivium you can you identify fallacies and also name the type of fallacy that is being perpetrated. For a list common fallacies that you could pop in your wallet see this Mental Antivirus checklist. To see some fallacies in action see below

I currently have the Mental Antivirus checklist in my wallet and have already brought some logical rigour to some pub conversations. I provided some friends a copy of the Mental Antivirus Checklist and found that using the common approach meant we had much more meaningful dialogue than normal.

Final thought

The word trivia is derived from  singular for the Trivium.  It is interesting how something so important has come stand for something so…………….trivial. I’d love know how you get on with the Trivium – Drop me line in the comments! Paul

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Carbon Footprint Nonsense

by with No Comment Behind the Newspower
  • Carbon Offset
  • Carbon Footprint
  • Carbon Trading
  • Carbon nonsense

I am getting increasingly irritated by the fuss about carbon. If you assuming global warming is the biggest problem the world currently faces I do not agree that reducing carbon is the solution. I believe a focus on reducing pollution and clean efficient technologies is a good idea to help the environment but to blindly just to to reduce you “carbon footprint”

Global Problems

  • Potable water shortage
  • Food shortage
  • War
  • Destruction of the natural world (you kill this we all die)
    • 95% reduction in all food crops genetic diversity in the last 100 years.
    • x acres of farmland turned to dessert
    • Genetic modificated organisms are currently cross-pollinating with natural occurring species which could screw up all the rest
  • The countries we live in are run by people with more power everday caused by erosion to our civil liberties increasing


gun

Gun Ownership vs Homicide Rate

by with No Comment Behind the NewsMaths

An assumption I have always had is that more gun ownership causes more murders. Recently I’ve heard some things that made me question this assumption so I have completed a little basic analysis and thought I’d share my findings.

My Analysis

I took the homicide rate per country from wikpedia (the countries were ordered by homicide rate). I then went to another website called http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region to get the % people with guns. I amended the gun ownership figures to the top and bottom and a few countries in the middle. I didn’t get all the % of gun ownership figures because it was too time consuming and I didn’t have time.

Results

>>For the full Spreadsheet showing all 186 countries in order of homicide rate click here
Comment
My analysis did not come out as expected. According to table I put together I can say there is no clear correlation between gun ownership % and homicide rate .  If it plays a role then I  can defiantly say it not the lead cause. The US leads the world in gun ownership and it has a high homicide rate for western countries (5 deaths per 1000) compared to say the UK which is (1.28 per 100) or Australia (1.3).  There were a number of Nordic countries such as Switzerland (45%), Norway (31.3%) , Austria (30%) that have high gun ownership that were in the lowest 10 for  homicide rates.

Conclusion

Based on this quick bit of analysis  it looks to me like war and poverty do look like they correlate with homicide rate but gun owenership does not have any appreciable correlation.

My spreadsheet  can be found here

I would appreciate any thoughtful comments. If you have better data that show things in a different light then I would appreciate it if you could send it me and I’ll continue this post once I look at that.

Wikileaks

Wikileaks and Julian Assange

by with No Comment Behind the News

Julian Assange is an Australian citizen that has recieved many awards for journalism and peace (see the full list in wikipedia) just this month he won a peace medal from the Sydney Peace Foundation and he has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize see reuters article here

On Friday I watch the video below

High tech terrorist
In an article in the The Huffington Post Vice President Jo Biden was reported as calling Julian Assange a high tech terrorist. The Uk’s Daily Mail quotes potential US presidential candidate Sarah Palin as demmanding that Julian Assange is hunted down like Osama Bin Ladin.

The court case
Julian Assange is fighting a court case that could see him be extradited to Sweden (and then the fear is extradited to the US on some terrorism charge). He is only required for questioning. This is very unusual for an individual in the EU to be extradited just for questioning on a crime – especially unusual where no charges have been laid. The case has been widely missreported in the media but is actually about is him having fully consensual sex with two woman on different occasions whilst not wearing a condom (this is against the law in Sweden) . The case was started after one of the women went to the doctors to be tested for STD where she explained she had consensual unprotected sex with Julian after which the police started proceeding against Julian. The offense is of “minor rape” where the accused can be found guitly of rape even of the the person raped consents (?). This does not have an equivilent in the UK or Australia, an article explaining this was published in The Australian newspaper.

To hear two feminists on the radio station Democracy Now debating the charge and whether a charge of consenting rape is approprate click here.

The US strategy to contain Wikileaks
In an ironic twist of fate the US strategy to contain wikileaks was leaked to wikileaks. Democracy Now recorded an interview about 12 months ago with Julian Assange where he discussed this leak (unfortunaltly I cant find the episode please add a comment to this article if you can find it) . The key components of the strategy were

  • Link the organization to one person specifically
  • Assassinate the persons character
  • Lay down the importance of the leaks
  • Attack its source of funding for the organisation

Any of that sound familiar?

About the video screening on Friday
The video at the top was screened in the Federation square in the centre of Melbourne buy the Australian journalists Union ACTU during the presentation a number of Australian journalists praised Julian Assange for his work. After that at the Melbourne State Library a guy called “Robert Foster” from the juice media made an impromptu performance on the steps. After a bit of digging I found this video

EXTERNAL SOURCES

ml_king

Little heard speeches of Martin Luther King

by with No Comment Behind the News

I have been listening to a podcast episode on Democracy Now where they played two speeches from Martin Luther King.

Nearly 48 years ago Martin Luther King (wikpedia page) delivered his optimistic and hopeful “I have a dream speech“. I’ve heard part of that speech before but never any others. The podcast played two other remarkable speeches from Martin Luther King. The speech “Beyond Vietnam” is still very relavant today. The second “I have been to the mountain top” is from a man who know his time on this earth is limited.

“Beyond Vietnam”

Exactly 1 year prior to his assasination he made a speech “Beyond Vietnam”
calling the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”. He also spoke about international aid “true compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar….it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring”. It was slammed in the media and Time Magazine called the speech “Demagogic Slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi” and time The Washington Post declared that King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”

“I Have Been to the Mountain Top”

In April 3, 1968 he made a speech called “I Have Been to the Mountain Top”. Towards the end of the speech he talks about the time he was stabbed and almost died. In hospital he received many letters of support and out of all the messages he received there was one that he’ll never forget. The excerpt below is from the end of that speech starting with that letter. In the speech he seems to foresee his own early death.
The next day he was shot dead.
Continue Reading

coins-225x300

Banks need no money to lend you money

by with No Comment Behind the NewsDisastersEconomics

I went to my bank to get some money to by my new car the other day. I needed $4000. They told me that officially I needed to give 24 hours notice for cash withdrawl over $2,000 however they had enough today so they could give me my $4000. Now my bank is probably a bit smaller than ANZ but I found this quite startling. It got me wondering about how much money banks have in reserve.

A note about Reserve banking . Banks don't need $100
dollars to lend you $100.The US has a requirement that
the banks have to at least own equity worth 10% of the
total loans outstanding. So if Citibank only actually
owned $10 then the sum of all the loans they could
make could not exceed $100.

So I did a little investigation and what I found (with a quick look on wikipedia) concearned me somewhat. I knew that the US had a 10% requirement I didn’t know though that the UK and Australia does not require any reserve requirement whatsoever. So they can make money loaning money they don’t have. I wish I could do that. A tabe showing the reserve requirements by country can be found here wikipedia.